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Eclipse Che 7 is Coming and It’s Really Hot (1/4)

A better plugin model, a new IDE, and Kubenative Workspaces — Eclipse Che Is on Fire !

With this article, I am starting a series of articles highlighting the new capabilities which will be introduced with Eclipse Che 7. This article provides an overview of the areas of focus for Eclipse Che 7 as well as its new IDE and ability to use different IDEs such as Jupyter.

Intro

What a year for Eclipse Che! Release after release, Eclipse Che gets better and better thanks to the engagement of the community and your feedback.

As an open source project, the core values of Eclipse Che are to:

Accelerate project and developer onboarding: As a zero-install development environment that runs in your browser, Eclipse Che makes it easy for someone to join your team and contribute to a project.

Remove inconsistencies between developer environments: No more: “but it works on my machine….” Your code works (or doesn’t) exactly the same way in everyone’s environment.

Provide built-in security and enterprise readiness: As Eclipse Che becomes a viable replacement for VDI solutions, it must be secure and it must support enterprise requirements such as role-based access control (RBAC) and the ability to remove all source code from developer machines.

At the beginning of 2018 we shipped Eclipse Che version 6.0. That was a major milestone which added capabilities needed for developer teams and enterprises who wanted benefits from shared and rationalized developer environments. You can read more in the release note from Eclipse Che 6.0.

A few months ago, we announced during CheConf 18.1 the beginning of a new journey and a new chapter for Eclipse Che version 7. Seeing the interest from enterprises already using Eclipse Che and from the community that is building cloud-native applications, we organized the Che roadmap into 4 main areas:

IDE.next: Updates to the editor to increase the joy of development.

Plugins: Features to drive further growth in the Che ecosystem.

Workspace.next: IDE tools running as microservices in containers to improve the fidelity between developer workspaces and production environments.

However, there is a substantial feature gap between Eclipse Theia and our current Che IDE. Most of this year has been spent adding needed features to Theia so that it can fully replace the current IDE. The Eclipse Che contributors have spent more than five years building web IDEs in the cloud. So when we decided to switch to Eclipse Theia, we naturally wanted to make good use of that experience to make the new IDE really substantial. And enterprise grade.

We’ve been working hard to bring:

Debug Adapter Protocol

Language Server Protocol

Commands

Preferences

Keybindings

Textmate Support

Security

In the following months, that new IDE will become the default IDE for your workspaces.

Different IDEs for different use cases

There is one more thing. Che will still provide a default web IDE for workspaces, but we also did important work in order to decouple the IDE so that it is possible to plug a different IDE into Che workspaces. There are a lot of cases where the default IDE will not cover the use cases of your audience, or you might have stakeholders who are using a dedicated tool that covers their needs instead of using an IDE. In the traditional Eclipse IDE world, that was done with RCP applications.

With Eclipse Che 7, you’ll be able to plug any tool you want into a Che workspace:

It can be based on Eclipse Theia (which is a framework to build a web IDE), such as the popular Sirius on the web: See the youtube video.

Check out Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces for Red Hat OpenShift (Beta)

Built on the open-source Eclipse Che project, Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces provides developer workspaces, which include all the tools and the dependencies that are needed to code, build, test, run, and debug applications. The entire product runs in an OpenShift cluster hosted on-premises or in the cloud and eliminates the need to install anything on a local machine.